…Stephen Colbert’s mocked Trump, saying, “Yes, it’s so simple. In fact, why didn’t the Jewish people have an armed guard for the last 5,000 years?” That line got the expected laughs from an audience that always applauds attacks on the president, but you don’t have to have to be a historian to understand that a lot of lives would have been saved over the centuries had vulnerable communities been able to defend themselves from anti-Semites intent on shedding Jewish blood. But while this issue, like just about everything else these days, seems to be all about Trump, it actually revolves around a dilemma that Jewish groups have been struggling with for decades.READ MORE

…First, Pittsburgh was hardly the first time an anti-Semitic gunman murdered people in a Jewish institution in the U.S. Between the Clinton and Bush II years, there was a shooting at a Jewish Community Center in L.A., a shooting at an El Al counter at LAX, a shooting at the Jewish Federation in Seattle, a shooting at a Jewish Community Center in Kansas City, and a shooting at the Holocaust Museum. Lower levels of vandalism and violence have been even more common. It’s true that the death toll in Pittsburgh was especially high, but that’s just happenstance; any of the other shoooters would have been happy to kill as many or more. READ MORE